Alice Brock, whose Massachusetts-based eatery helped inspire Arlo Guthrie's deadpan Thanksgiving standard, "Alice's Restaurant Massacree," has died at age 83.Guthrie announced the death on the Facebook page of his own Rising Son Records label."This coming Thanksgiving will be the first without her," Guthrie wrote."Alice and I spoke by phone a couple of weeks ago, and she sounded like her old self.
We joked around and had a couple of good laughs even though we knew we'd never have another chance to talk together." Guthrie wrote that she died in Provincetown, Massachusetts, her residence for some 40 years, and referred to her being in failing health.He did not say what was the cause of death. Born Alice May Pelkey in New York City, Brock was a lifelong rebel who was a member of Students for a Democratic Society, among other organizations.
In the early 1960s, she dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College, moved to Greenwich Village and married Ray Brock, a woodworker who encouraged her to leave New York and resettle in Massachusetts.Guthrie, son of the celebrated folk musician Woody Guthrie, first met Brock around 1962 when he was attending the Stockbridge School in Massachusetts and she was the librarian.
They became friends and stayed in touch after he left school, when he would stay with her and her husband at the converted Stockbridge church that became the Brocks' main residence.On Thanksgiving Day, 1965, a simple chore led to Guthrie's arrest, his eventual avoidance of military service during the Vietnam War and a song that has endured as a protest classic and holiday favorite.Guthrie and his friend Richard Robbins were helping the Brocks throw out trash, but ended up tossing it down a hill because they couldn't find an open dumpster.
Police charged them with illegal dumping, briefly jailed them and fined them $50, a seemingly minor offense with major repercussions.By 1966, Alice Brock was running The Back Room restaurant in Stockbridge, Guthr...